tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16958083.post6233355518266263980..comments2023-10-16T19:20:24.549+08:00Comments on Out of my mind: The power of hopeBong C. Austerohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07798514780319855742noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16958083.post-72310858769589846542009-10-18T15:33:05.565+08:002009-10-18T15:33:05.565+08:00Thanks for all the comments, guys.
I don't ...Thanks for all the comments, guys. <br /><br />I don't think that we disagree on the major points. <br /><br />I, too, agree, that the award does not really honor actual achievements. Like I said, it seemed to honor the spirit which Barack Obama represents so eloquently at this point. Potentials are to some people's minds, more potent than reality.<br /><br />I agree that there are others out there who are also as worthy as Barack Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize. I don't think that their accomplishments or their exemplary achievements have been rendered worthless because Obama was chosen over them. <br /><br />What I find noteworthy in all of these exchanges is this: We all care about peace in the world. Unfortunately, it is a task that cannot be left to the Obamas of this world. <br /><br />So I hope this gives us the opportunity to take a hard long look at how we see peace and our own individual roles in making it happen.Bong C. Austerohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07798514780319855742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16958083.post-11382533611860842452009-10-16T13:18:37.077+08:002009-10-16T13:18:37.077+08:00I hope President Obama built his new way for 2012 ...I hope President Obama built his new way for 2012 election... its good you would be the next president... don't worry.brazilian hair straighteninghttp://joshuaaltback.com/brazillian-hair-straightening.aspxnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16958083.post-10918434624104340902009-10-16T12:00:34.373+08:002009-10-16T12:00:34.373+08:00Nobel Losers Who Were Just Not Good Enough...
Ch...Nobel Losers Who Were Just Not Good Enough... <br /><br />Chinese Human Rights Activist Hu Jia - imprisoned for campaigning for human rights in the PRC, not as worthy as Barack Hussein Obama. <br /><br />Wei Jingsheng, who spent 17 years in Chinese prisons for urging reforms of China's communist system. -- not as worthy as Barack Hussein Obama. (Not to mention the symbolic value of awarding a Chinese dissident on the 20th Anniversary of the Tianenmen Square Massacre.)<br /><br />Greg Mortenson, founder of the Central Asia Institute has built nearly 80 schools, especially for girls, in remote areas of northern Pakistan and Afghanistan over the past 15 years - not as worthy as Barack Hussein Obama.<br /><br />Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad, a philosophy professor in Jordan who risks his life by advocating interfaith dialogue between Jews and Muslims, also not as worthy as Barack Hussein Obama.<br /><br />Afghan human rights activist Sima Samar. She currently leads the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and serves as the U.N. special envoy to Darfur and is apparently also not as worthy as Barack Hussein Obama.Richard Macalintalnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16958083.post-25508533022471504432009-10-16T11:55:40.158+08:002009-10-16T11:55:40.158+08:00Barack Obama's receiving the Nobel Peace Prize...Barack Obama's receiving the Nobel Peace Prize should surprise and astonish exactly nobody. <br /><br />The prize committee has long since abandoned any pretense of being anything other than a leftist political body determined to undermine any and all actions by the United States or other democratic bodies who deign to defend themselves against murderous aggressors. This is the same committee which awarded the very same prize to the gangster Yasser Arafat, and frankly admitted that bestowing the award on Jimmy Carter was "a kick in the leg" to George W. Bush.<br /><br />Any roster of peace prize recipients that does not include the likes of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and/or Pope John Paul II is incomplete, and such omissions render the prize itself meaningless. <br /><br />Had the president decided to decline the honor, he would have been universally applauded for acknowledging that the prize has not yet been earned - that while he appreciated the gesture of goodwill and confidence, it was not his to claim. No. As he has accepted the plaudits and royalties of a book it is increasingly clear he did not write, he will accept an award (plus the check that goes with it) for accomplishments he did not achieve. <br /><br />In this world gone mad, Barack Obama's validation by this particular committee of moral relativists more interested in platitudes and bromides about the big, bad USA as opposed to tangible accomplishments by those who have actually done the hard work of sowing peace and freedom is perfect.matthewnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16958083.post-49766434099941435782009-10-16T11:49:27.188+08:002009-10-16T11:49:27.188+08:00I am at a total loss for words. Sometimes, an even...I am at a total loss for words. Sometimes, an event occurs that is so sublimely ridiculous that it becomes a parody of itself. That's what we have here.<br /><br />The news could just as easily be a Saturday Night Live comedy skit or a Mad Magazine layout. If it had appeared in either one of those venues yesterday, it would have seemed a ripe subject for satire and humor. I daresay even many liberals would have laughed at the notion of Obama getting the Nobel for peace.<br /><br />No sense ignoring the obvious; what has he done? Teddy Roosevelt got his peace prize for mediating between Japan and Russia and ending their bloody war. Woodrow Wilson got his for his efforts at peace after World War I. Jimmy Carter - whatever else you can say about him - engineered a singular, personal triumph with the Camp David accords which was the first peace agreement between Israel and another Arab state.<br /><br />What's Obama done? What peace has he negotiated? What efforts of his have born fruit?<br /><br />I suppose an organization that thought Yassar Arafat worthy of the same prize can't be taken seriously anyway. But they are. And there are implications beyond the profound stupidity of awarding this prize to a neophyte who hasn't accomplished anything.Uncle Samnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16958083.post-22571800375432249222009-10-16T11:45:04.382+08:002009-10-16T11:45:04.382+08:00In all seriousness: this is complete lunacy, of co...In all seriousness: this is complete lunacy, of course. There was a whole host of worthier contenders for this prize, from Zimbabwe's Morgan Tsvangirai to the Green Revolutionaries in Iran. Even Bono would have been a more deserved winner than Obama, who has done precisely zip, zilch, nada, to deserve this award. In his nine short months in office, he has achieved nothing apart from giving a few speeches, befriending a few dictators and alienating a lot of allies. To award such a prestigious prize as a sort of encouragement to perhaps achieve things that would justify the decision after the fact is beyond a joke.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16958083.post-35424021027865402902009-10-16T11:38:04.586+08:002009-10-16T11:38:04.586+08:00How could they not award the prize to Mr. Obama? S...How could they not award the prize to Mr. Obama? Set aside what it is that he actually seeks to accomplish - if he even knows. Barack Obama is widely perceived in the world as determined to achieve the abolition or reduction of not one, but of two, of the world's most formidable -- and most reviled -- standing armies: Those of the United States of America and of the State of Israel.<br />This use of the Peace Prize as a political weapon against the United States is not new.<br />Long gone are the days when recipients were the likes of Lech Walensa (1983), Mother Teresa (1979), Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin (1978), Andrei Sakharov (1975), Martin Luther King (1964), George Marshall (1953), Albert Schweitzer (1952), Charles G. Dawes, himself a Chicagoan and a former Vice President of the United States (1925), and former President Theodore Roosevelt, who negotiated an end to the Russo-Japanese War (1909). That they all actually did something is beside the point. Rather, to one degree or another, American or not, they all represented some principle tied to the American Idea.<br />Instead, the modern crop of Peace Prize-winners, even when they have been Americans, were chosen as conscious rebukes to the United States and American "exceptionalism": Yasser Arafat (1994), Jimmy Carter (2002), Al Gore (2007), Kofi Annan (2001), Mohamed Al-Baradei (2005), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), the International Atomic Energy Agency (2005), and even the United Nations (2001) itself.<br />The American Idea - a republic, e pluribus unum, of self-governing people, built upon the bedrock of limited government and the rule of law, in the civic life of which race, religion, ethnicity, origin, and class mean nothing, and in the private life of which they can mean as much or as little as people freely choose - is hateful to the "concept" of Oslo and therefore to the men of Oslo.<br />That's the message of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.<br />Through our history, the success and survival of the American Experiment have depended on the approval of no potentates, pundits, philosopher-kings, or peoples chained to the old orders. They have resented us for it, but they have been able to do nothing about it, because America's fate was in the hands of the American people, and the Americans knew, understood, treasured, and defended their heritage of constitutional liberty.<br />Until now. Are Americans still revolutionaries, free and brave, determined to go our own way, the benighted "values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population" be damned?<br />Do we still "yearn to breathe free"? Or have we sold our birthright for a mess of pottage, of the cradle-to-grave "security" that is promised, in varying visions, by those old men in power in Oslo, Teheran, and Beijing?<br />This is not about Mr. Obama. It is about us.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16958083.post-85364534770255285052009-10-16T11:36:57.195+08:002009-10-16T11:36:57.195+08:00It's not about Barack Obama.
It's about th...It's not about Barack Obama.<br />It's about the United States of America and its role in history and in the world. <br />The unambiguous message of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee of the Storting, Norway's parliament, is candidly stated in the public announcement of the Prize. It is the dream of a world in which the role of the United States of America in all respects is vastly diminished.<br />Mr. Obama remains what he has been throughout his remarkable political career: An exponent of certain "values and attitudes" and, more, a living symbol of them. Those who share those "values and attitudes" recognize them immediately. For nearly everyone else they drift by, vague, barely erceptible, lost in the radiance of the individual man's personality and his myth. <br />The Peace Prize Committee gets it. In honoring Barack Obama they mean to honor the "concept" that he represents. If it stimulates the honoree to do more to advance that concept, so much the better, but that is not the main point.<br />The old men of Oslo fervently hope that they are heralding a new reality. It is not Barack Obama, per se, but the emergence of a "new American": Unexceptional, no longer revolutionary, conforming, instead, in the words of the Prize Committee's announcement, to the "values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population".<br />The American tradition of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and Madison is one of rejection of "values and attitudes" that have shackled most of the world's people throughout most of history, and that continue to do so to this day.<br />Our tradition is a paradox, of course, that of the "conservative revolution", for behind the American Founders stands a long and ancient tradition of our own, from Biblical and classical antiquity through the evolution of the common law to the thought of Locke, Smith, and Burke. The paradox at the heart of our tradition celebrates the free individual as a member of an organic civil society.<br />But it is a paradox that works. Those, beginning with the Americans themselves, who do the hard work of understanding and living this tradition have proved that they can build societies that are, at once, free, rich, generous, tolerant, principled, and decent, leaving others seemingly in history's dust.<br />We of that tradition see ourselves as apostles and defenders of liberty. Old men in Teheran see us as atheists and libertines. Old men in Beijing see us as marketeers and materialists. Old men in Oslo see us as unrefined "cowboys".<br />These groupings of men, whether or not chronologically old, represent old orders that America has challenged from the beginning. At least superficially, they do not have a lot in common with each other, except one thing: They know that the American Idea is, and since 1776 has been, their joint, several, and ultimate enemy.<br />The world's tyrants, thugs, and airy experts have mocked, despised, and feared the American Experiment since its birth. They have been much frustrated, defeated, and galled by America's global preeminence over the last century.<br />They almost certainly do not see themselves as I have characterized them. They may even perceive themselves as somewhat conservative, the defenders of their respective old and legitimate orders.<br />The men of the Prize Committee recur, respectfully, to the will of Alfred Nobel, where they find that he directed the Storting to bestow the award upon "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16958083.post-82965931592926552542009-10-16T04:21:36.802+08:002009-10-16T04:21:36.802+08:00they should really leave Obama alone I mean really...they should really leave Obama alone I mean really.chris brownhttp://www.vacationrentalsad.comnoreply@blogger.com